Uzbekistan's policy of secretly sterilising womenBy Natalia AntelavaBBC World Service 11 April 2012(They remove their uterus after giving birth or during other routine examination. The doctors are given mandates to do so. Is this their version of Obama Care?)

Karimov one of the world's worst dictators:Parade MagazineOur new best friends boil dissidents alive

Peter Hitchens

Last updated at 12:16 23 April 2004

Mail Online

They boil people to death here.

They also beat them up in the street, suffocate them, drag them to mental hospitals and forcibly inject them with drugs, ram bottles up their behinds in squalid prisons and plant drugs on them, not to mention all the usual things such as censoring the newspapers and rigging the elections.

Of course, there is no shortage of nations where this sort of thing goes on.

Human rights organisations complain about it and we are shocked. But what makes Uzbekistan different is that President Islam Karimov is an ally of the free, democratic West, which fights under such mottos as 'enduring freedom'.

He is an official friend of Britain and the United States and so we must overlook his little faults; the occasional boiling, the far-from-occasional execution, the odd unexplained death in custody, an estimated 6,000 political prisoners in a country of 25 million people and the almost total lack of genuine liberty, law or democracy. These things are just not as important as the higher purpose of our national interest.